Nillion

• Nillion is a network for storing and computing on sensitive data without decrypting it.

• It uses secret sharing to split data across nodes so no single node holds anything meaningful.

• NIL is the network token.

• Supply allocated across community, ecosystem and investors.

• Used to pay for blind computation and secure the network.

Pros:

• Secret sharing is computationally cheaper than fully homomorphic encryption for many operations.

• Applications in private AI inference and confidential storage are concrete.

• Not a blockchain in the conventional sense, which avoids consensus overhead for storage.

Cons:

• Security depends on nodes not colluding, which is an assumption rather than a cryptographic guarantee.

• Privacy computation demand remains limited relative to the infrastructure being built.

• Competes with several approaches to the same problem.

• Exposure to privacy-preserving computation with better performance than homomorphic alternatives.

• Node distribution reduces single-point exposure.

• Weigh the non-collusion assumption, which is weaker than an encryption guarantee.

• Secret sharing across nodes rather than encryption, so computation on private data runs far faster than homomorphic approaches.

• Storing sensitive data anywhere means trusting whoever holds it.

• Splitting it so no node holds a usable share removes that trust, provided the nodes do not collude.

• Founded by Alex Page, Miguel de Vega and Andrew Masanto.

• Backed by Hack VC, Distributed Global and HashKey.

• No public ICO. Distributed through airdrop and ecosystem allocations in 2025.

• Node collusion would defeat the privacy guarantee entirely.

• Privacy computation demand is smaller than the supply being built.

• Competing privacy technologies with different tradeoffs.

• Early stage with limited production deployment.